I am planning on purchasing a new desktop/workstation that will be dedicated only for rendering images and animations on Solidworks Visualize Professional (for now).

Any thoughts on what the recommended hardware specs for the software are? I can't seem to find it anywhere online since Dassault has done quite a good job of making sure all things Bunkspeed now redirect to the Solidworks Visualize page.

My current set up lets me render stills of my machines in 3200x1800 resolution in about 6-8 minutes, which is acceptable. But when I try to render animations, it takes me close to 12-14 hours for a 1 minute video at 30FPS.

I currently have 2 Quado 4000s, one of which is in my current desktop. I plan on using both in the new rig, but I'm not sure if Visualize will actually make use of both of them to help speed up renders. Brian Hillner, could you provide more insight into this?

There are several options depending on budget, ranging from entry to top class. While still somewhat important for general applications, the specs of the CPU isn't that critical for Visualize. Just make sure to have at least 16GB of system memory.

If budget allows, I would suggest dual NVIDIA graphics cards. There are several options for which cards to choose, and the link below might provide some help on what to purchase. The NVIDIA M4000 is a great entry level GPU, and the M6000 is NVIDIA's latest flagship GPU. The link below benchmarks the single GPUs against each other and also multiple GPUs against each other...whereas a 2x M4000 system might be perferred to a 1x M5000 system.

Also something to think about...we are going to launch our Network Rendering solution with our 2017 product this October. This is a separate application that can be installed on dedicated Visualize render machines to send all your Visualize render jobs...just like a printer queue in the office. No one uses this machine for anything else, not even to set up Visualize renders. This is purely a dedicated render machine just to crush Visualize render jobs. Therefore, you will see a shift in spending a ton of money on individual user's machines and more on increasing the hardware in the network rendering machines. So I wouldn't break the bank on your daily usage machine, and spend the majority of your budget on this dedicated render machine(s). I would have minimum 1x M4000 (2x preferred) in your daily machine, and then spend the rest of the budget on this dedicated network render machine. Some users have 4x or 8x GPUs in their dedicated Visualize network render machines, and even some have multiple machines!

Anyone else out there in the Visualize community have other hardware recommendations?